Lamb to the slaughter

I’ve been reading Fergus Nicoll’s new biography of Shah Jahan, which devotes considerable attention to the succession battle that preceded the emperor’s coronation.

It included the extraordinary step of holding off his brother Shahriyar, the powerful queen Nur Jahan’s favourite, by temporarily enthroning a third party. Their teenaged nephew, Dawar Bakhsh, was crowned and had prayers read in his name in the imperial mosque, while Shah Jahan’s allies waited for their true king to return to the north from the Deccan and put the scapegoat to the sword.

I did not bring up this history in order to draw a comparison between Nur Jahan and Sergio Ramos. It’s just that Real Madrid is an entity that exists in a narrative dimension of its own, halfway between despotic theatre and space opera. The story of Julen Lopetegui, his failures, and his unceremonious firing this week constitute only a sideshow in the procession of the club’s history. Still, as sideshows go, it deserves to be remembered.

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This weekend, Barcelona tipped Real head-over-heels, 5-1, at the Camp Nou. Had Barca been less delightful to watch, more eyes would have been on the sidelines. There Lopetegui, the club’s third or fourth choice after Zinedine Zidane abruptly resigned last season — the only way to avoid the club’s marryat-night, murder-at-dawn approach to coaches — stood, eyes fixed on the field, almost certainly seeing beyond to his fate. The blow was falling. On Twitter, it was a done deal in fans’ eyes even before Luka Modric’s agonising, post-rattling miss in the 56th minute.

No one in top-flight football, not even Real’s Florentino Perez, a man as rococo as his name, fires a coach for one game. But it was easy to imagine that this was the case for a second. There’s something merely crazy about the thought that Lopetegui’s sacking was a moment of tyrannical whimsy. The idea that it was the result of a sustained and unprincipled delusion over the purpose of appointing him in the first place, was too sad to contemplate.

Lopetegui was a scapegoat. Anyone who thought otherwise either didn’t look at his playing career, competent but far from commanding (compare this to Zidane, who would have started with the respect of any conference room or dressing room in the world, even with no coaching talent); at his club managerial record (lots of movement but embarrassing results at Porto); or just, you know, at Lopetegui himself.

Ayouth team coach has to be a shrewd manager of volatile and unpredictable energies. Lopetegui presumably fulfilled that role to some degree in the Spanish U-19 and U-21teams he coached to victory between 2010 and 2014. His job as the custodian of a generational transition — and of colliding egos — in Spain’s men’s national team may be seen as a continuation of that supervisory, fortifying task. Neither he nor Spain had a chance to see it succeed.

It feels like a lifetime ago but it’s been less than six months since the Spanish FA fired Lopetegui in the middle of the group stages of the World Cup because he chose to let Real Madrid announce his next job before he was quite done with this one. Why? Lopetegui was not going to be the man to coach them to their next Champions’ League title, to return to league-beating form in Spain, or to rebuild, overnight, the Jenga tower from which the slippery tile that was Cristiano Ronaldo had slithered out. He was, at best, going to be a friendly face in the dressing room. He was a Carlo Ancelotti without the tactical pedigree or the lifetime experience of swimming with sharks.

Unless Lopetegui was himself a galáctico — that is, literally from outer space, unknowing of human ways — he must have known that these were unfair expectations, and that there was oblivion awaiting him if he failed to fulfil them. Perhaps he believed that, for patiently bearing the supreme embarrassment of being fired as Spain’s manager in order to profess loyalty to Real, he deserved more of a chance from the club. Perhaps he simply thought that getting two of the best jobs in world football in the same year already meant success.

We don’t know when poor Dawar Bakhsh, the teenager who was briefly crowned padshah sultan of Hindustan, understood what awaited him. He was beheaded, with his brothers, less than fifteen days after his coronation. One account of the assassination says that the young victims were ushered into a bathroom to which only Shah Jahan’s chief conspirator had the key. Like Luis Suarez’s hat-trick, the last thing they saw was the approach of the imperial executioner Reza Bahadur. It is not reza (virtue), but qaza (fate) that has arrived, Dawar Bakhsh is supposed to have said. And so it has.

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